While vacationing this past June at the Outer Banks, I stopped one afternoon at a small bookstore in the sleepy coastal town of Buxton. After navigating past romance, mystery, and local fiction to the classics corner (Moby-Dick and the Odyssey make the best beach reading), I was arrested by the cover of a slim, Oxford World’s Classics paperback: A young woman, perched alone atop a mountain wearing a white dress that stands in sharp relief against a vast expanse of blue sky, leans forward with her elbows thrust out like wings as she clasps her sunhat to her face. Her lips are slightly parted and her eyes gaze heavenward in a classic posture of ecstasy.
The book, Edith Wharton’s short novel Summer, was originally published 100 summers ago. Wharton wrote it in spurts while she did relief work and fundraising in France during the war. Though she ranked the book as one of her own favorites, Summer has never enjoyed as much popularity as her other New England story, Ethan Frome (1911), her second novel The House of Mirth (1905), or her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence (1920).
Summer follows a young woman, Charity Royall, who, at the start of one summer in a dreary town, yearns to break free from her provincial life, a desire that leads to an intense but short-lived affair with a young architect visiting from the city. This is the story of one woman’s pursuit of the kind of passionate, ecstatic life depicted in the painting on the cover of the Oxford paperback—a detail from Charles Courtney Curran’s Woman on the Top of a Mountain. But the painting is something of a false promise, since its image of radical autonomy is an ideal Charity longs for but never achieves. Wharton challenges the reader to consider whether it is ever possible to pursue a truly “individual adventure” and, if not, whether all lives fall into predictable patterns. She depicts a tragic irony in her heroine’s choice of life—a seemingly unconventional path that becomes the most conventional and stifling of all.
The novel’s opening pages echo with Charity’s bitterness: “How I hate everything!” Charity does hate everything: her life under the roof of her guardian, the aged lawyer Royall, who once made a sexual advance toward her after the death of his wife; the lack of stimulation in their town of North Dormer; and her shameful origins as a child rescued through the goodwill of the Royalls from the “Mountain,” a “little colony of squatters,” drunks, and outlaws just above the town.
Charity begrudgingly takes a job at the local library, not because she thinks reading or education will help her escape the “dumb woe” of her life but because she hopes to earn enough money to leave North Dormer for good. Although she has no interest in the “long, dingy rows of books,” the library seems to be the site of her salvation when it is visited by Lucius Harney, a young man who represents everything that North Dormer is not: beauty, sophistication, independence.
From the moment Charity meets Harney (as the narrator refers to him) in the library, Wharton’s plot enters familiar territory. A contemporary reviewer for the New York Times noted that the story was “as old as civilization itself”; a reviewer for a Boston paper described it as “a tale of seduction of the sort that has been popular on the stage and in the novel since the beginning of the art of storytelling and novel writing.” As early as the second chapter, we know how the novel will end. This is the “fallen woman” plot, retold by Defoe, Austen, Flaubert, and many other varied writers: boy meets girl of lowly social standing; boy seduces girl; boy abandons girl; girl is left to deal with her ruined reputation and broken heart, most often through prostitution, death, or throwing herself on the mercy of family.
If Charity had read more literature, she would despair to know that her life had taken such a turn for the formulaic. And there’s the rub: In pursuit of an extraordinary life, Charity has guaranteed that her fate will be like that of so many who have come before her. She craves more than anything to live the life that no one has lived before, the life that she alone discovers and that contains the secret and “sacred treasure of her happiness.” The passion she shares with Harney, she convinces herself, is the exception to the rule. Its sophistication makes it unlike the prosaic relationships she’s seen unfold around her: “She had always kept to herself, contemptuously aloof from village love-making, without exactly knowing whether her fierce pride was due to the sense of her tainted origin, or whether she was reserving herself for a more brilliant fate.” In Charity’s mind, the universe will dole out a special portion to her that it denies everyone else.
In short, Charity believes she has achieved (though she doesn’t conceive it in these terms) an Emersonian self-reliance: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” According to Emerson, the individual looking to live the best life should strive for radical autonomy, seeking only within for truth and inspiration. Charity believes she has found this escape from convention in the secret cottage she and Harney reserve for their daily tête-à-têtes. Charity discovers that “the only reality was the wondrous unfolding of her new self”—a double entendre implying that their love affair has begot her sense of freedom as well as the child she now carries.
At several key moments in the plot, societal expectation interrupts their dream of being “so isolated in ecstasy.” In one crucial episode, her guardian, Royall, arrives at the cottage to demand that Harney marry Charity and make of her an honest woman. The realization dawns that marrying Harney would corner her into a conventional role: “Instead of remaining separate and absolute, she would be compared with other people . . . the freedom of her spirit drooped.” Increasingly, Charity finds herself stuck in the narrative equivalent of a Chinese finger trap: The harder she pulls away, the more stuck she finds herself.
She visits an abortionist, but recoils in horror as she remembers what happened to Julia, one of the girls from North Dormer, who had been seduced by a local boy, visited the same abortionist, and ended up a prostitute. “Was there no alternative but Julia’s?” she wonders. In seeking her sui generis fate above more-familiar life paths, Charity realizes that her story has been told before. And this leaves her with even fewer options than before: prostitution or escape to the Mountain to give birth there. She decides to return to the Mountain, the final place that seems to promise the freedom she seeks.
When Charity reaches the summit, she must face the reality that the price of rejecting society and its strictures is poverty. In the novel’s darkest and most disturbing scene, she attends the wretched funeral of her mother. Charity’s mother had also borne a child out of wedlock and lived as an outlaw on the Mountain. Like Scrooge confronted with his own grave, Charity glimpses her future. This vision of squalor and anarchy is what radical autonomy leads to—not the promise of limitless horizons but a Hobbesian free-for-all. Wharton’s critique of Emersonian individuality was perhaps what T. S. Eliot meant when he said that Summer would “certainly be considered ‘disgusting’ in America.” The image of the confident, satisfied woman atop the mountain is ultimately a mirage.
When life on the Mountain proves untenable, Wharton delivers her protagonist a final turn that ends the novel in the exact place the reader of a “fallen woman” story might expect. Charity avoids a life of prostitution and poverty by turning to the one avenue left to her: marriage to her much-older guardian, Royall. He once represented captivity; now, union with him offers her comfort and security.
By consciously pursuing what she takes to be an extraordinary destiny, Charity guarantees that she finds herself in exactly the most predictable one. Was there no hope for Charity from the beginning? Does the novel really suggest that it is impossible to find the road less traveled by? The seeming fatedness of the troubling ending does not provide comfortable solutions to these problems. It is precisely because of the novel’s moral complexity that readers and critics have felt compelled to interpret it in so many ways: as a story of female oppression at the hands of male authority, as a bold exploration of sexual awakening, as a sober look at the way young people must shoulder responsibility, or, as I have presented it here, as the failure of Emersonian autonomy.
Charity would be incapable of contemplating her own story in any of these terms. The narrator’s comment in the first chapter, “Never had her ignorance of life and literature so weighed on her,” plainly refers to Charity’s neglected education, her unworldliness (in contrast with Harney), and her inability to think critically and plan for the future. But that line also suggests that our own lives can achieve a kind of narrative coherence if we take advantage of books and education, pushing to understand the many different stories that have been told before.
Of course, there are stories, most notably Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, in which the protagonist is undone by reading too many stories. Charity’s problem is that she’s read too few. Part of why she becomes trapped in a narrative “as old as civilization itself” is because she didn’t realize it existed in the first place. Wharton’s novel is not just another “fallen woman story,” for as much as Charity would have hated to recognize this fact, it could have been her salvation. That day in the library when Charity met Harney, she was wrong to place her hopes in him instead of the books around her.
Kirsten Hall is a graduate student at the University of Texas.
